PATH DECOMPOSITION AND SEMILINEARITY OF PETRI NETS

Semilinearity plays a key role not only in formal languages but also in the study of Petri nets. Although the reachability set of a Petri net may not be semilinear in general, there are a wide variety of subclasses of Petri nets which enjoy having semilinear reachability sets. In this paper, we develop sufficient conditions for Petri nets under which semilinearity is guaranteed. Our approach, based on the idea of path decomposition, can be used for consolidating several existing semilinearity results as well as for deriving new results all under the same framework.